Remembering Tiananmen: The lessons of history

Zhang Xianling holds up photos of her son Wang Nan, who was killed in a 1989 military crackdown. Zhang is a member of the Tiananmen Mothers, a group that campaigns for the truth about the event to be revealed and for criminal and historical accountability. (AP)

Even after the Chinese army moved into Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3, 1989, and cleared it of the detritus left by the students who had occupied it for most of the previous seven weeks, it was several days before observers were certain who was in control of China.

A visitor, looking down Beijing’s central boulevard, Chang’an Avenue, at a maze of still-burning barricades a day after the bloody operation, was not alone in wondering whether the Communist Party ever could heal. The Economist wrote then, summing up a common view, “This week China looked into the abyss of coup, countercoup and civil war.”

Foreign doomsayers were proved wrong. Even after 25 years of relative stability, however, it is still wise to be cautious about the cohesion of Chinese politics.

It was not only foreign observers who were given to apocalyptic musings at the time.

“If the rebels had had their way, there would have been a civil war,” paramount leader Deng Xiaoping told a visiting Chinese-American physicist, Tsung-Dao Lee, three months after the army crackdown that left hundreds, if not thousands, dead.

Thanks to strenuous efforts by the Communist Party to erase memories of what happened, many in China now have only a dim understanding of the history of the protests in Tiananmen Square and the nationwide unrest they triggered. Deng’s analysis is remarkably close to the mainstream, however, among the generation of young urban residents who have grown up since. If they have heard of the 1989 protests, many feel that, though the killings may have been bad, the army’s resolute action helped to create the stability that allowed China’s economy to grow from one that was then smaller than Britain’s into the world’s second-largest.

This argument, however, glosses over the factional infighting within the party that paralyzed decision-making and allowed the protests to grow to the scale they did. Even after Tiananmen, Deng appeared to recognize that political stability was by no means assured. By 1992, then retired, he had concluded that the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies was attributable mainly to their failure to make citizens richer. To avoid a similar fate for China, he went on his famous “southern tour” to drum up support for a fresh round of economic reform.

It was this bold move, in the face of stiff conservative resistance, rather than the crushing of largely peaceful dissent that laid the groundwork for China's prosperity today. As he tottered around southern China, berating conservatives and calling for the liberation of China’s economy from ideological shackles, Deng remarked, “If any problem occurs in China, it will arise from within the party.” His words remain apt.

Not since the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 has China enjoyed such a prolonged period of stability as it has between Tiananmen and today, setting aside a handful of high-level purges and numerous street protests, most of them isolated and triggered by local grievances. Still, political risk is as important to bear in mind as the wobbles that are causing growing numbers of observers to worry about China's economy.

Neither kind of risk is grounds for immediate alarm. The government appears sufficiently in control of the economy’s levers — not least through ownership of the main commercial banks — and has sufficient assets at its disposal to prevent a sharp slowdown, at least for another few years.

One important lesson of Tiananmen, however, is that politics in China has a capacity to surprise. In the months before June 1989, respected observers pooh-poohed rumors of a serious rift within the leadership.

There are few such rumours today. President Xi Jinping often is described as the strongest leader in China since Deng, and he has been moving fast to consolidate his power. He has set up powerful new organs to oversee national security and economic reform, and has taken personal command of them.

Nonetheless there have been hints, both before and since the handover of power to Xi in 2012, that politics at the top remains prone to strife. Eight months before Xi took over, a fellow member of the ruling Politburo, Bo Xilai, was purged, ostensibly for corruption and abuse of power but also, many observers believe, because he threatened Xi’s future grip on power.

The mopping-up continues. Xi is now trying to eradicate the influence of Bo’s powerful patron, Zhou Yongkang, who was the country's security chief until he retired in 2012. Zhou is being secretly investigated for corruption, the highest-ranking leader to be targeted on such grounds since the party took power in 1949. Rumors abound in Beijing that Xi is encountering resistance from other retired elders who fear that he is rocking the boat.

It is extremely difficult to gauge the level of political stress that these developments are causing. Official statistics can be vague and misleading, but there is no concerted effort, as there is in politics, to keep the outside world in ignorance of pertinent facts.

Contacts between Chinese leaders and foreign journalists were limited even before Tiananmen, and were curtailed even further after it. Not since November 1987 has a general secretary of the party given the foreign press corps an unfettered opportunity to ask questions about his policies.

There was an exhilaration to that occasion in the Great Hall of the People, when the newly appointed party chief, Zhao Ziyang, raised glasses with foreign journalists and fielded impromptu questions in an unprecedented display of openness.

It would have been wrong to read too much into it, however. Zhao said that those who believed conservatives and reformers were at loggerheads would “make one mistake after another” in their analysis. He himself was purged by the conservatives during the Tiananmen upheaval and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Xi admits that economic reforms have entered “deep water.” As he put it, on a trip to Europe last month, “We must get ready to go into the mountains, being fully aware that there may be tigers to encounter.”

These tigers could include others at the top. Perhaps in an effort to avoid a Zhao-like fate — Zhao was the last party chief to put political reform high on his agenda — Xi has begun his leadership with two parallel crackdowns, one on corruption and the other on political dissent. Part of his strategy, many believe, is to scare corrupt officials into compliance with his reforms while preventing dissidents from fanning the flames of discontent in a society that has undergone profound and wrenching change during the past decade alongside broad economic growth.

The new president has three new social forces to contend with that grew to critical mass under his predecessor: a huge middle class, an equally large underclass of rural migrants and online social media that have enabled discontents to connect and communicate with remarkable ease, in spite of vigorous censorship.

He probably can prevent street demonstrations from coalescing into anything like the 1989 unrest. Even if the economy were to slow sharply, a couple of years of stagnation might not pose a great threat to social stability.

After all, China has experienced slumps before. Tens of millions lost their jobs in the late 1990s as the regime closed down money-losing, state-owned enterprises. Protests did erupt, but most were small. After the global financial crisis in 2008, millions of migrant workers were laid off from export industries. Most, however, had ties to farms in the countryside to which they returned for a few months before finding new work when manufacturing picked up.

Despite the current slowdown, employment is holding up well. If the economy were to slow more dramatically, many migrant workers could again melt back into the villages.

There also are reasons to worry about external dangers as China flexes its muscles to assert territorial claims in the East China and South China Seas. Xi appears to have abandoned Deng’s post-Tiananmen dictum that China should “hide its capacities and bide its time.” His latest territory-marking maneuver came earlier in May, with the installation of an oil rig in waters claimed by Vietnam. This triggered bloody anti-Chinese riots in Vietnam, but Xi appears unconcerned by the risks.

His moves seem calculated to avoid direct military conflict, but, if a clash were to occur, he might stand to gain politically at home. After Tiananmen the party launched a campaign to boost “patriotic education” among students. The aim was to portray the party as the embodiment of Chinese nationalism. It appears to have rubbed off: Young Chinese especially applaud Xi’s more robust stance toward Japan, a country they are taught to abhor.

Elite politics, however, is more of a wild card. The Bo affair of 2012, which came to light only thanks to the extraordinary flight of his police chief to an American consulate in the southwestern city of Chengdu, was a sharp reminder of how erratic it can be.

Both Bo’s case and that of his mentor, Zhou, have exposed the power and wealth of family networks within the leadership and their extensive influence in business. It will take all Xi’s strength to keep high-level corruption in check. The protesters in 1989 were enraged by it even then, but they would be astonished today. In a case that came to light in the Chinese press this month, an official was found to have $16 million in bank notes stashed at his home.

Xi’s sweeping campaign against corruption, the toughest in China in many years, will make him powerful enemies. So too will his efforts to expose big, state-owned enterprises to greater competition and rein in profligate local governments. He has called for “decisive results” by 2020 in his drive for economic reform. This will require measures that could make him unpopular with the public, however, such as the implementation of a property tax that would infuriate the better off.

After Bo’s arrest, rumors circulated on Chinese social media of an attempted coup by Zhou. The reports proved fanciful, but they suggested that some Chinese at least are prepared to imagine extreme scenarios.

The party has a good chance of maintaining its grip on power during Xi’s remaining eight years at the top. The risks — political, economic and international — are growing, however. The party has proven unexpectedly adept at tackling a series of crises since 1989, but it will need to be even more agile if it is to remain in power for another 25 years.